‘Storing medical records on blockchain could save NHS time and money’

Blockchain technology could ease the burden of administration on the NHS by storing patients’ medical data, a conference has heard.

The level of health data is growing all the time putting pressure on the health service, Navin Ramachandran from the University College Hospital told an event on distributed ledger technology in London today.

Eric Fish, from the non-profit Federation of State Medical Boards in the United States, told the Healthcare: unblocked 2018 conference today: “The NHS has patient identity management issues that could be helped with blockchain”.

Fish said that the technology, which stores details and transactions on a digital database, could be used to store people’s medical records for the NHS.

But he warned: “There’s an institutional mindset that needs to change and getting any sort of IT development into government can be difficult”.

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